February 3

Still no internet, I sent out a message last weekend to try to get some information but nothing seems to be happening. I full week of teaching is complete. We went through days 3-7 of the timetable this week and everything is in order. I gave a quiz to the grade 9 classes today on states of matter, changing states, diffusion and pressure. Some of them seem to be getting it pretty well but some of the learners' English is so bad that I don't know how much I will be able to do for them. We had a big faculty meeting this week about the poor performance of the school on the grade 10 exams. The sad thing is that everyone knows the problem is mostly English, and everyone knows the kinds of things that should be done to rectify the situation but no one seems to have the will to make it happen. The teachers did speak English during break today though. That is the first time I have been able to understand a conversation in the staff room. Last night I was trying to think of more ways to encourage everyone to practice English and I'm thinking about playing Win Mr. Blackburn's Money. Instead of Ben Stein trivia though I would play any takers in Boggle or Scrabble. I need to test this out before I start offering money, but I think it sounds like fun. I can make Boggle easy enough that we might be able to have some trial games before I put my money on the line. Also I think it would be fun to start a betting pool on the crossword puzzle that is in the Namibian (newspaper) every Friday. I don' t know if anyone will get into this idea and I would probably have to give some big odds to join the pool myself, but who knows? Maybe some games and some money will help people practice English more and learn more words. So, the week of teaching went pretty well. The grade 8 kids have a hard time understanding me, but I think that will get better with time. I haven't been feeling great all week, so by the end of the week I decided not to push ahead into a new unit. In my cloud of frustration after the faculty meeting I decided I would quiz the grade 9 and read a story to the rest of the classes on Friday. I ended up getting a very positive response from the kids, although they asked me to read slower than the snails pace I started at. Every class enjoyed the stories and seemed excited about the prospect of hearing more stories in the library in the future. Now I just need to get other teachers to take turns with reading and eventually get some of the older kids to read as well.

I am doing well overall. I have a bad day every week when it seems like nothing will ever get accomplished but then I get back to being an optimist. Some of the learners are so far behind that they will probably fail no matter how much I try to do for them and some of the teachers seem to have their priorities skewed. However, everyone here has been wonderful and a lot of the kids show tons of potential to do really well. I attended a joke of a subject meeting where I was asked to set the agenda for the meeting. A high point of this week was on Wednesday I got two different girls (grade 4 & 7) to read stories to me.

This weeked I am staying in Coblenz, cooking chili and cornbread in honor of the Super Bowl and grading/lesson planning. I'm hoping to finish John Milton's Paradise Lost and I'm going to spend some quality time with Cora jamming on some Waterdeep songs. I am getting the hang of playing by ear, but its tough. I learned to play My Baby Keeps Me Sane Sometimes (my favorite Waterdeep song), I'm Still Here, and Nickel Creek's When You Come Back Down.